This week, Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council, told Politico that Trump gets a “mulligan,” or do-over, on his past moral transgressions, because he’s willing to stand up to the religious right’s enemies. Evangelicals, Perkins said, “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”

Perkins' argument and even language and tone are telling. The Christian Right is a political movement; political first and religious second. That doesn't mean that they are not ardent believers in the salvific work of Jesus Christ and its implication for all who have faith in Christ: eternal life in heaven. But it's noteworthy that after hundreds of hours of fellowship, sermons, worship, and Bible studies, the fruit of most conservative Christians' faith most publicly becomes not inspirational lovingkindness but right-wing political activity and even moral relativity when it suites them.

Goldberg notes that desegregation and not the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing regulated abortion was what triggered the rise of the Christian Right.

In his 2014 biography of Jimmy Carter, the Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer quotes the conservative activist Paul Weyrich: “What caused the movement to surface was the federal government’s moves against Christian schools. This absolutely shattered the Christian community’s notions that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they please.”

Consider the Christian Right in light of a key pattern seen in the Bible by New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan. He writes:

the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God’s nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization’s violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ......Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities. (Crossan, John Dominic. How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation.)

Thus we have the earlier, peaceful Jesus of the Gospels who enters Jerusalem on a humble donkey and the later, wrathful Jesus of Revelation, the last of the Bible's books to be written, who is violent and mighty. The Christian Right is perhaps surprisingly worldly insofar as they take the work of Christ to their heart and from that bear the fruit of machinations, the worldly game of right-wing and increasingly reactionary politics. They are more Imperial Rome than New Jerusalem, more the Machiavellian state than the Kingdom of Heaven. They keep their faith so long as it is not one that causes them political discomfiture.

Former Methodist mega-church pastor and now progressive evangelical blogger and youth pastor John Pavlovitz recently reacted to an example of this sort of political conservative Christianity, the Christian Right's embrace of Donald Trump. On his blog Stuff That Needs to Be Said, Pavlovitz, addressing "White evangelicals," writes:

Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.

Image from The New York Times online: Jerry Falwell Jr., left, at a campaign event for Donald Trump in 2016. Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images